Microalgae: bibliometric relationship of biorefineries, circular economy and the environment

Abstract

Microalgae have various advantages over vegetable crops, such as their growth speed, the greater consumption of CO2 and production of O2, and the vast variety of products where they can be used. For this reason, the present work seeks to quantify the trends that exist in microalgae research, by running related keywords in Scopus databases in a span of ten years. The central words used were related to biorefineries, microalgae, products and simulation.  Likewise, the Wizdom.ai platform and VosViewer data analysis software were used. It was found that between 2015 and 2019, publications increased around 74 and 89 %. The graphical and statistical analysis through VosViewer allowed identifying the relationship between biorefinery and microalgae. Which showed that there is a trend in publications on the topic of biofuels, and that there is still little information corresponding to the biorefinery concept related to the analysis between microalgae and process simulation. Based on a global analysis of the abstracts of most of the publications, the main difficulties and information gaps in the processes under the biorefinery concept were identified, especially relating processes, costs, circular economy and environmental aspects.